Please send letters for the website, clearly marked FORUM, to Julia Dawson at: julia.dawson@emap.com or The Architectural Review, Greater London House, Hampstead Road, London NW1 7EJ, England. View from Ramallah reaction SIR: Permit me, if you will, a few observations about Mr Kay’s article in View From Ramallah and the propriety of electing to publish it in The Architectural Review. Mr Kay might attract more sympathy to his cause (I call it 'his cause', though it is evidently yours as well) – if, instead of indulging in the platitudes and wild assertions that generally mark the claims of agitators and propagandists, he would state some facts which are actually verifiable. Certainly the most important of these is that the Israeli incursion into Ramallah and other cities and towns controlled by the Palestinian Authority only came in the wake of 18 month of suicide bombings that claimed the lives of hundreds of Israeli men, women and children culminating in the massacre at the Passover (seder) celebration at the Park Hotel in the seaside town of Netanya. Only after that outrage did Israel decide that it would have to root out the terror at the source – the territories controlled by Mr Arafat and his minions. Mr Kay seems to think, or so he suggests, that one fine day bored Israelis simply decided to march into Ramallah The comparison of Auschwitz and Ramallah is so warped that it hardly merits a response. However, the insinuation that Jews, precisely because they have suffered the ravages of the Holocaust, somehow have a greater responsibility to turn the other cheek and accept being blown to bits or shot down is unacceptable. On the contrary, the Holocaust taught Jews that they have no one to depend upon but themselves. Given the choice of killing or being killed, one can only hope that Jews and Israelis will respond the way any normal people would -- namely to strive for self-preservation. I doubt whether Englishmen, or anyone else for that matter, would react differently. If the Anglo-American campaign in Afghanistan is any indication, they would not (though readers of AR are still awaiting 'A View from Bora Bora'). To expect (or ask) Jews or Israelis to adhere to a different standard of morality – to accept the death and destruction – is antisemitic by any measure. Among those killed in the Netanya bombing were a number of Auschwitz survivors. One can only wonder what they would make of Mr Kay’s appeal to 'Jewish collective memory' and the suggestion that the sufferings of Palestinian Arabs somehow 'echo' their own. Alas they cannot tell us. Presumably it assuages the British conscience to suggest that Israelis are akin to the Nazis – it somehow makes the fate of the Jews less tragic and even palatable. Given what we know about the British actions to prevent Jews from escaping the Nazi inferno (the first shot fired by the Royal Navy in World War II was across the bow of a ship crammed with Jewish refugees heading toward Palestine), let alone the way British forces behaved in countries near and far (for example the way in which they crushed the Arab rebellion in Jenin in the late 1930s) one imagines that this could certainly be a soothing sentiment. And of course, it 'contextualizes' and legitimizes the acts of the suicide bombers who have wrought such murderous havoc in Israel’s cities and towns. Expressing antipathy toward Jews, transparently cloaked in righteous indignation about Israel’s actions (or simply those of ‘that shitty little country’), is both acceptable and even chic in British society. And evidently your journal has determined that it too must demonstrate its slavish fealty to this fashion – using Mr Kay’s Jewish credentials as a not very original defence against charges of antisemitism. That you felt compelled to use your journal, ostensibly devoted to architecture, as a platform to air such contemptible views is a telling commentary both on your attitude toward Jews and on your rather pathetic need to conform with prevailing canon, however contemptible. LAURENCE WEINBAUM Jerusalem